UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Dozens of College of Communications faculty members and researchers will make Washington, D.C., a blue-and-white hotbed during the annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in early August.

Experts from the college had 38 papers accepted for presentation and will moderate or participate in 15 separate panels during the four-day conference, scheduled Aug. 8-11, in the nation’s capital. Eleven of the papers were selected as the best in their division and three graduate students earned awards or AEJMC-sponsored grants for their work.

The productivity of College of Communications researchers -- with 45 different authors presenting work at the international conference -- ranks second to the University of Florida among all participating programs this year.

In the past decade, the College of Communications has perennially ranked among the top 10 programs with researchers presenting their work at the conference. Still, this year’s productivity represents a 15 percent increase over the program’s best previous year, when 39 researchers presented their work in 2010.

“Memory of An Out-Group: (Mis)identification of Middle Eastern-Looking Men in News Stories About Crime,” Jennifer Hoewe and Tanner Cooke, first-place student paper, Minorities and Communications Division;

“Net is Neutral, But the Media is Not Neutral: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Print News Coverage of Network Neutrality,” Ju Young Lee, first-place student paper, Cultural and Critical Studies Division; and

“Turning to the Wiki-Doctor? A Study of Wikipedia Health Information Use and Perceived Credibility by Internet Users and Doctors,” Marcia DiStaso, AEJMC 2013 emerging scholar.

Individual graduate student honors were earned by Dunja Antunovic, recipient of the Mary Gardner Award for Graduate Student Research, and Jennifer Hoewe and Brett Sherrick, who secured travel grants for their work.

AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. The association’s mission is to promote the highest possible standards for journalism and mass communication education, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multicultural society in the classroom and curriculum, and to defend and maintain freedom of communication in an effort to achieve better professional practice and a better informed public.

Founded in 1912, by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.AEJMC’s annual conference features sessions on teaching, research and public service in the various components of journalism and mass communication -- from advertising and public relations to electronic and online journalism to media management and newspapers. Pre-convention workshops deal with teaching advertising, media ethics issues, incorporating diversity in the curriculum, teaching media management and teaching visual communication.